Reviews & Recommendations

Blogging 201: Day 2

Today’s assignment is to “Audit Your Brand.” I find this kind of difficult as my blog is fairly new. Day 1 was setting my goals. That I managed. But how do I reach these goals? What kind of blog do I need in order to reach them? How will my blog look like? What features do I need?

Our assignment requires us to look at the way we share information on and about our blog, and to make it focused and consistent.

I share my blog posts via Twitter, Tumblr, Google+ and Facebook. That way, I try to engage my friends and followers on other platforms as well as the ones who read my posts here on WordPress. I use accounts that I had before not new ones only for this blog. Some of them have quite a high follower count. I’m not sure if a lot of my followers from other platforms actually click on the links and read my posts though. Some of them surely do. Is there a way to find out how many come from other sites? Yes, well, the stats. If I take them as a guideline, seemingly only 1-2 followers from Twitter and Facebook but no one from Tumblr clicks on the links that lead them to my WordPress blog. But some of my Tumblr followers do read my redirected posts on Tumblr, like and share them. So how accurate are the WP stats, really?

Is the way I share information consistent? I think I need to work on that. Make a calendar, post similar things on the same weekday, etc. This way, my followers will know when to expect what.

Are the topics I write on consistent and focused? Yes, I’d like to think so. “Culture” is a very wide term, and I want to keep it wide in order to blog about different things that are of interest to me and hopefully to my readers. Be that what could be called “traditional” culture such as literature or theatre or “popular” culture such as television, film, and comic books.

What about the features and the overall look of my blog, then? I think I want to try out some new things like a header, play a little with my theme, get new widgets… I will create a try-out-blog for that and test out what might look good on my blog. If I find something interesting, I’ll use it. The first thing that I will add is a category widget. I think that’s useful as my readers will be able to see how much I write about each topic. I’m not sure if I want to keep my tag cloud though. At the moment, it disturbs me more than it helps. What do you guys think? Keep or not?